I’m not done with the formless (which is to say, I’ll never be done with the formless). However, here’s an interjection: the wonderful Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino was in Toronto last week, a joint endeavour by (at least) the University of Toronto, New Music Concerts, and Roger D. Moore (thank-you all so much!). I expected the music to be astounding – Sciarrino’s compositions have been very important to me for a long time – and despite expectation and familiarity, the music did indeed astound (stun and confound) me. These concerts, together with brilliant performances of some of Giacinto Scelsi’s music by Arraymusic pianist Stephen Clarke in early January, brought to mind a piece of writing I did for Quatuor Bozzini to accompany their concert Magie Italienne, the Italian magicians performed being Aldo Clementi, Scelsi and Sciarrino. Here it is:

Aldo Clementi, Giacinto Scelsi and Salvatore Sciarrino (let’s discuss them as if all three were still as alive as their music): three Italian magicians; practitioners of Magia Naturalis—Natural Magic. They are musical alchemists. And like alchemists, running their experiments in a world without scientific laws, all three explore and mobilize sound and time in a way that, while profoundly in contact with a rich variety of musical practices and histories, is at the same time radically apart from and other to the conventions and criteria that have traditionally governed those practices and histories. Musical alchemists, all three offer the listener uncanny transmutations of materials (sonic and temporal); transmutations that give rise to heard worlds, unstable and ephemeral, whose experiential complexities are far in excess of their components and structures.

Aldo Clementi writes canons; in the traditional musical sense—building up musical texture by overlapping similar materials in time or having them unfold at different speeds—but also in a more literal sense. “Canon” comes from the Greek word for “rule” and Clementi’s music is constructed from layers of rules: prescriptive systems often bloody-mindedly processing appropriated, pre-existing music. However, Clementi’s magic resides in the degree to which these machinations remain opaque and mysterious, never coherently determining the musical experience. This marvelous disjuncture between compositional methodology and resulting listening possibilities brings to mind an actual transmutation from the history of alchemy: not the ideal change from lead to gold, but rather, distilled urine transmuted to glowing phosphorus (check out the discovery of phosphorus in 1669 by German alchemist Hennig Brand).

Giacinto Scelsi’s music is radically sensual. I never hear it as an expression of a pre-existing idea, never merely a physical manifestation of a sounding situation that has already happened virtually in Scelsi’s imagination. Rather, I get the sense that Scelsi starts with a desire for an experience that can only occur through listening, through deeply feeling (in every sense of the word) a profound, complex, variable contact with sounds arranged in time. Fortunately, he requires other musicians to make this event happen, allowing other listeners the opportunity to feel this music along with him. All three composers here are concerned with extreme detail and with Scelsi the focus is on the shifting affects of sensation engendered by small sonic differences; he asks us to share with him what some have called an “Inward listening”. He composes a peculiar organum in which a non-functional harmony, free of progression, is created by adding thin strands of pitch (manifold frequencies, microtones) and noise to a monody sometimes made up of only a single note. His music is sensual but in no way superficial; Scelsi’s magic resides in the intense focusing of immanent wonder.

Clementi and Scelsi compose music. Clementi constructs sounding machines that function to produce insidiously marvelous works; Scelsi notates schematics that allow musicians to produce events that will in some way fulfill his desire for an experience that can only happen through listening to—feeling—those organized sounds. Obviously, Salvatore Sciarrino composes music as well; and yet, to me, Sciarrino’s music sounds more like something he discovered than made. It’s a music that seems to be a quietly dynamic collection of discrete organisms and/or strange mechanical artefacts (maybe wind-up toys that dance) inadvertently interacting; that are already there (somewhere), doing what they’re doing, before our ears and imaginations come upon them. It’s a music that brings together shards of musical phrases (maybe shavings left over from Clementi carving out his musical structures) and flashes of subtle, transient noise (maybe a thin strand that has escaped, taken a line of flight, from Scelsi’s organum) that situate themselves in temporal proximities that suggest (more than create) an uncanny lyricism.

I feel that with all three composers’ work I am not merely receiving some musical message they are expressing and delivering. Rather, for all their differences, their musics seem to unknowably appear and disappear, without any narrative devices like beginnings, middles and endings to regulate and give closure to their drifts through time. And I feel as if I am with each of them, together, sharing the experience of the music that each has caused to happen. With Clementi, I am encountering with him the unpredictable possibilities that arise from his intertwining structural processes. With Scelsi, I am immersed with him in his sensual sonic flow—both of us penetrated and amazed. With Sciarrino, I am with him on dérive, wandering through a weird sonic psychogeography, both of us dream-archeologists/naturalists finding and exploring the strange arrays of fragments and gestures we encounter. Aldo Clementi, Giacinto Scelsi and Salvatore Sciarrino: three Italian magicians, whose work is brought together in the hopes of eliciting more unknowable magic.

Arraymusic has a concert coming up on December 3, 8PM, EST. It’s called Formless. It features existing works by a remarkable collection of composers: John Abram (CAN/UK), Joanna Bailie (UK), André Cormier (CAN), Laurence Crane (UK), Nicole Lizée (CAN), and Cassandra Miller (CAN). All of these composers are artists I intend to collaborate with in the next few years to create new work for The Array Ensemble.

The title of the concert invokes Georges Bataille’s famous definition of informe, usually translated as ‘formless’. Part of that definition reads: “On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a [squashed] spider or spit.” Bataille’s informe does not embrace any kind of lack or a denial of substance, but rather it’s a challenge to the activity of abstracting an outside that can be generalized and evaluated as separate and distinct from an inside.

But I misspoke. Even though the sentence quoted above is from an entry Bataille wrote for the “Critical Dictionatry” (a reoccuring section in the quasi-Surrealist magazine Documents, published in Paris in 1920 and 1930, edited by Bataille)—an entry dedicated to the word informe—definition was precisely what Bataille was interested in defying. Definition, from the Latin definire—from de- “from” (in this case implying a kind of completion) + finire, “finish” (from finis, “end”)—is all about fixing meaning, holding it still, ending the flux of ambiguity (from ambigere “waver, go around,” from ambi- “both ways” + agere “to drive”). Bataille is prostesting against the power and control he perceives asserted by fixed, static meanings, against the dominant structures—the cultural forms—that set and authorize the parameters of what a word represents. In his entry, Bataille imagines a dictionary that “no longer gives the meaning of words, but their jobs/tasks (and “jobs/tasks” is a translation of the French les besonges, a word that implies the mundanity of a chore; he chooses “jobs” rather than the richer, grander idea of “uses”). As Denis Hollier says in his remarkable book Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille:

“The distinction between words’ meaning and their jobs makes language into a place of specific productivity. In language and in every connection to it some practice is at stake. To privilege meaning at the expense of work is to believe that this practice can be put into parentheses. The French word besonge, with its overtones of drudgery, has a contemptuous ring. The job is not the usage. Usage doubtless introduces a certain historicity of language because it refers to linguistic practices in current use at the present time and in the present society. […] Usage only functions in a space still dominated by the category of meaning—formulable meaning. What Bataille calls job is of a different order, a tonal one. It indicates all those processes of repulsion and seduction aroused by the word independent of its meaning.”

And Bataille proposes in his entry what he considers the job of informe (formless) to be: “Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere like a spider or an earthworm.” But Bataille is not protesting against this designation, he’s celebrating it and this celebration is vital and active (though certainly he’s vilifying the squashers). “Affirming that the universe resembles nothing” might bring the idea of the universe down, but it is not a dismissive affirmation. While the power structures that authorize meaning might want to squash this designation, Bataille wants to get down and dirty working in this splatter, this “place of specific productivity.” To say the universe resembles nothing pulls apart the integrity of what the idea, the meaning of “universe” might be said to represent; the form of the universe is not analogous to other forms because no form is being asserted. To affirm that the universe is formless, allows “universe” to do a different job: it’s just everything, or rather, all-the-things (plural), shifting arrays of amorphous yet radically specific places where work can be done.

Okay, if you’re hoping that eventually I’ll make some kind of clear, direct link between the above and the pieces that will be presented at Formless (the concert), I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. And there’s a lot above (and below) that won’t be unpacked by me in any context and that is well in excess of the concerns I am thinking about here (I’m all for starting things I would never want to see finished). And of course it should be underlined that Bataille is valourizing the formless as a way to think the world—a plural universe that resembles nothing—and being in it. That is, any experience, any phenomena can be engaged as formless. That includes every musical experience. But I will say that each of the pieces that will be played on Dec. 3 encourages me, in utterly particular ways, to engage it as a distinct place of specific productivity rather than a meaningful structure expressing ideas (the ancient Greek word eidos, often translated as Idea, is also translated as Form).

Maybe the end of the programme note Laurence Crane sent me for his clarinet and piano piece Sparling—to be performed Dec. 3—relates to this somehow; regarding his composition: “It’s essentially static but the tiny amount of change that does take place in the work happens in what might be thought of as the accompanying instrument in a traditional duo relationship. What is foreground and what is background in this piece? I’m not sure.”

I studied music composition with Rudolf Komorous in Victoria, British Columbia between 1983 and 1988. Rudolf is a composer of experimental music and he demonstrated what a high-stakes, multifarious vocation that can be. In particular, his ideas about wonder/strangeness – ideas that I first encountered when I met him in Banff in 1981 – have progressively backgrounded much of my thinking on life (including art, including music) ever since.

Rudolf started to formulate these ideas while still living in Prague in the late nineteen-fifties. He was a member of a group of artists who met regularly in the cellar of the Moravian Winery near Wenceslas Square and called themselves Smidra. He was the only musician in the group, which was largely made up of visual artists. Together they developed an estetiku divnosti. Divnosti is a plural noun derived from the adjective divny (Rudolf thinks Smidra might have coined it). Divny is most commonly translated as “strange,” but it also appears as “weird,” “bizarre” or “peculiar.” A recent Czech recording of Komorous’ early work translates estetiku divnosti as “aesthetics of curious things.”[1] In Canada it came to be translated as “the aesthetic of the wonderful.”[2] The shades of meaning implied by the complexity of translation fit well the kind of artistic engagement Smidra aspired to. The group’s intention was “to drive every situation to its end-point, so that the serious and the trivial cannot be distinguished” as well as “to bring into play paradox and the mystifying, in the joy of experiencing the wonderful.”[3] Rudolf further explained in an interview that, “the group’s main philosophy was that things should somehow be driven on the edge – on that edge when you cannot really recognise what’s serious, what’s not serious; you know, what’s true, what’s not true; what’s sort of from life and what is a sheer imagination. Simply that edge – because we thought that on that edge real things happen.”[4] [One relatively superficial articulation of this sensibility can be observed in the group’s chosen name. Smidra is a character from traditional Czech children’s stories, often associated with puppet theatres (versions of these tales are common throughout Germany and Austria as well). He is the sidekick of Kasparek, the industrious little hero who cunningly and mischievously overcomes adversaries much more powerful than himself. Smidra on the other hand is a proud but oafish, well-meaning village constable – always carrying a sabre, but one that is usually uselessly blunt (each member of the Smidra group would wear a sash and carry an edgeless mock-sabre). And, as Rudolf puts it, “he’s incredibly dumb – incredibly dumb as a proper sidekick should be; always doing wrong things.” At the same time Rudolf is emphatic about the seriousness of the culturally subversive intent of this group of artists. It was both provocative and polemic to purposely take on such a self-deprecating set of associations, invoking a character stumbling around impotently, generating unintended chaos at the margins of heroic deeds. They were associations – involving a public official (a constable), uniforms and harmless weapons – made even more piquantly baffling in the context of Czechoslovakia’s Communist milieu, where artistic activity could be emphatically censored (the secret police took interest in the Smidra group as much for their sabre wielding as for their irregular aesthetic beliefs). Smidra’s very name generated a situation where it was continuously problematic to distinguish what was trivial and what was serious.]

The Wonderful is a peculiarly evocative name for that edge, enfolding the trivial and the serious. “Wonderful” embraces the innocuous – a hackneyed term of appreciation, a limp superlative. It embraces a range of reactions and actions that can be variously synonymous with other words like delight, amazement, astonishment, bewilderment, curiosity and questioning. And it can name an historically complex category which, most profoundly in the Middle Ages, belonged to that crucial area between the known and the unknown – between the mundane and the divine miraculous; denoting the passion of “wonder” in the presence of “wonders,” and whole orders of marvels – preternatural objects and occurrences.

Driving “every situation” to an endpoint – or better, an edge – where the nature of that situation is difficult to apprehend and evaluate may suggest an aesthetisised confusion – an intentionally provocative play with ambiguity and/or absurdity. Smidra’s maxims might hearken back to Baudelaire’s statement the “The beautiful is what is bizarre;” or Apollinaire celebrating his artist-friends’ ability to create beauty from a “new source: surprise” (a beauty worthy of Lautréamont’s simile: “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”[5]). And there seems an obvious connection between the estetiku divnosti and André Breton’s declaration in the First Surrealist Manifesto: “Let us resolve therefore: the Marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvellous is beautiful. Nothing but the Marvellous is beautiful.”[6] However, by ascribing beauty to the marvellous, the bizarre – that is, to divnost – the above implies traditional aesthetics: aesthetics as evaluation, as an appreciation of beauty; aesthetics as a judgement. It seems to me that the estetiku divnosti—certainly as it expresses itself in Komorous’ music—is pointing towards another kind of activity. Komorous’ music is not about strangeness or an appreciation of the bizarre. If encountering divnosti pushes one to “that edge,” the pushing, and what’s doing the pushing, is not the point; the point is what can take place on that edge – what those “real things” that might happen might be. As he stated in a recent interview: “Well you know, to do something weird or unusual is not very difficult. So you just…to do something…just against…but here it should be about something. It should have some depth you know, truth, as we say in art, but also life. This is a difference; it’s not a bizarre kind of thing, it’s not so difficult to do something bizarre or weird, but this [divnost] I would say is a much warmer kind of thing.”[7]

The estetiku divnosti embraces not-distinguishing, not-recognising, the mystifying, and paradox not merely to celebrate those conditions, but rather to break down that prevalent economy that limits the experience of art to an appreciation of its effects and affects—“do I like it?”; “is it good?” The estetiku divnosti posits art as a co-creative experience that proliferates from the passion of wonder. I’m going to defer to art-theorist John Rajchman in setting how high the stakes can be when interaction with art is activated and a listener/viewer/reader ceases to be only an arbiter of the worth of a commodity. The following quotes come from his book considering the thought of the late French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, The Deleuze Connections. Rajchman states that Deleuze’s “aesthetic takes the form not of a judgement, but rather of an experimentation and creation that defies judgement.”[8] It is important to register that the aesthetic fundamentally refers to the act of apprehending art in general. Thus, it is not the making of art that is being considered an experimentation and creation, but the experience of it. This notion already defies one pervasive formulation of art that views it as a medium that carries and communicates some kind of significant emanation from the artist that the viewer/listener/reader grasps and evaluates. For Rajchman’s Deleuze, “art (and thought) is never a matter of ‘communication’. . . . For what [art] supposes is a condition of another kind, not transcendental, but experimental. . . . In Deleuze’s aesthetic, a ‘will to art’ is always concerned with the emergence of something new and singular, and requires us to ‘invent ourselves’ as another people.”[9] For Rajchman art is not about life – it does not somehow symbolise the artist’s world-view. Nor is art a rarefied object – it cannot be reduced to an epiphanal manifestation of artistic vision, held aloft for a consumer to admire. For Rajchman, art is preternatural not supernatural. It is a psychic location that occupies the attention of someone who possesses the “will to art.” These are states of mind as “real” (and “truthful”) as any other; but which lie beyond (just beyond, or maybe beside) the conventions and praxis of the field of daily experience. These are states of mind that exist on Komorous’ edge. For Smidra and Rajchman, art is a way to get to that edge; and Rajchman suggests something of the nature of the real things that can happen there:

“[The] aim of art is, through expressive materials, to extract sensations from habitual sensibilia–from habits of perception, memory, recognition, agreement–and cause us to see and feel in new or unforeseen ways. . . . Thus art is less the incarnation of a life-world [a kind of illuminating, if numinously poetic, representation of human experience, of humans’ interaction with their world] than a strange [divny] construct we inhabit only through transmutation or self-experimentation, from which we emerge refreshed as with a new optic or nervous system.” [10]

Rajchman refers to some other pervasive philosophies of art as “aesthetic pieties.” He states that “we must push sensation beyond transcendence where it becomes a matter of belief not in another world, but in ‘other possibilities’ in this one.”[11]

The above implies a dynamic way of being with art, any art. And Rudolf taught from the perspective of the estetiku divnosti, pointing at the wonders scuttling around the edges of a great deal of well-known music. Of course, these observations took a non-hierarchical form: Fux, Zelenka, and Corelli were considered more often than J.S. Bach; C.P.E. Bach and Haydn more often than Mozart (but Rudolf wasn’t being ideologically polemical: particular works of Mozart were crucial to him); Schubert more than Beethoven (although Rudolf’s example allowed me to drift freely through the utter divnost of Beethoven’s last two piano sonatas; I still use them to teach composition); Smetana more than Brahms; Janacek more than Bartok; J.M. Hauer more than Schoenberg. What had to be avoided were the ensconced codes and conventions that allow the generalised membership of (post-)European culture to be certain that the composers that follow the word “than” in the above list are patently Greater than those that precede it. And Rudolf taught me the joy of avoiding these codes when making work as well – listening to music and making music are profoundly congruous activities on that edge where real things happen; they are each aspects of sharing and taking part.

Of course, there are many makers of art uninterested in their audience taking part in a co-creative experience. They desire to be priests of “aesthetic pieties” – transcendental geniuses lauded by an appreciative public (they embrace, exploit, and assert those codes and conventions that authorise the value of their work). The convention that asserts that art is transcendent can be used as a tool to neuter its revolutionary potential—it supports belief in “another world” that we look up to, rather than inciting us to look around for “’other possibilities’ in this one.” I don’t think that culture at large (and I’ll accept all manner of suggestions as to what the hell that might be) wants “us to ‘invent ourselves’ as another people.” I think the estetiku divnosti does. I find in Komorous’ music a radical immanence – I’m not reaching out or up or beyond; the unknown is percolating through me right where I am, right at that moment. My attention and imagination are encouraged to move through and interact with what is there. I don’t mean this just in the phenomenal sense of attending to sound and how it takes up time. Rudolf’s music also embraces culture and history and the musical conventions that are carried along by tradition. However, he doesn’t embrace them to use them, to once again assert their power. He embraces them to rub up against them and feel their texture and pull at the threads that make up their weave. And any convention is potentially available for this synergetic/viral cuddle, including the ones that make high-art high (i.e. transcendental). In Komorous’ music they are stripped of their authority and brought down to us so we can go out and play in the wonderful weirdness of what they are (rather than what they mean).

How and why does Rudolf’s music make these possibilities so invitingly available and welcome (for all of its revolutionary potential, Rudolf’s Wonderful is indeed a warm kind of thing)? There can’t be a definitive answer to this (imagining this state intrinsically defies definition); it can’t arise coherently from a set methodology. As Rudolf put it: “Yes, you know, it [divnost] is about something for sure. But you often or almost always don’t know precisely what. You cannot put your finger precisely on ‘this’, because it’s on the edge, you know. . . . So you immediately can see something or it simply becomes bizarre, or weird, or fantastic. . . . Nobody knows what divnost is, there was that kind of feeling. We [Smidra] never tried to establish any theory, there was no manifesto.”[12] This is one way in which Rudolf is an experimental composer (and it shows again how close composing and listening is in this aesthetic). He doesn’t know in advance what wonder is; he has to experiment–he has to try activating situations that he/we might find wonder in.

When I try to represent to myself something of this divny state of mind, I find myself making a lot of metaphorical comparisons to the Wonderful as it was perceived in the Middle Ages: “Wonders tended to cluster at the margins rather than at the center of the known world, and they constituted a distinct ontological category, the preternatural, suspended between the mundane and the miraculous.”[13] Wonders/marvels were not really supernatural, above (super) nature. Rather, they were preternatural, beyond (preter) nature, often just beyond, on the edge of the mundane. Miracles were understood as supernatural. They were direct acts of God. They were transcendent, flowing from a spiritual realm. Wonders were immanent, in the world, a part of the world, but somehow remarkably other to its regularly experienced operations. This otherness could include everything from “accidental” aberrations of nature like a six-fingered child or magnificently astonishing and wildly rare and exotic phenomena such as manticores and dragons. Wonders, and the wonder they elicited, existed as a true margin: “Wonders as objects marked the outermost limits of the natural. Wonder as a passion registered the line between the known and the unknown.”[14] The medieval wonderful was an edge analogous in many ways to Rudolf’s edge. It wasn’t rationalised, either scientifically or theologically. Wonders were unknowable (if they became known, in the sense of being understood, they ceased to be wonders). They were defined merely by their effects. Daston and Park point out that, as in modern English, in a number of medieval European languages the same, or very similar words were used for both objects (wonders) and the passionate reactions they gave rise to (the feeling of wonder), “signalling the tight links between subjective experience and objective referents.”[15] An example of these tight links can be observed in their presentation of a thirteenth-century catalogue of wonders compiled by an English nobleman, Gervase of Tilbury. It is a wildly varied collection of one hundred and twenty-nine “marvels of every province – not all of them, but something from each one”[16]:

“At first glance, this list appears incoherent. It included plants, animals, and minerals; specific events and exotic places; minerals and natural phenomena; the distant and the local; the threatening and the benign. Furthermore, Gervase had compiled his wonders from a wide range of sources. Many (dolphins, the phoenix, the portents) came from classical texts, while others were obviously biblical or belonged to the capacious Christian corpus of wonder-working sites, images, and relics. Still others, like the werewolves and dracs, had their roots in Germanic, Celtic, or other local oral traditions. Yet for all their diversity, Gervase stressed the coherence of this catalogue of wonders, locating it in the emotion evoked by all of them.”[17]

It is significant that the criteria for being a wonder was, fundamentally, that it made one feel wonder. Indeed, other quasi-objective, analytical/hierarchical taxonomies (as in asking “how is it marvellous?” and “how marvellous is it?”) were not really applied when it came to organising an appreciation of the marvellous. Beyond the basic coherence of the passion of wonder, modes of grasping marvels were essentially local (that is, focused on the marvel’s peculiar locale) and particular. Marvels did not have to be spectacular or sensational. As French historian Jacques Le Goff observes “the marvel barely ripples the tranquil surface of daily life. What is perhaps most troubling about medieval marvels is precisely the fact that they merge so easily with everyday life that no one bothers to question their reality.”[18]

There’s something about the non-hierarchical particularity of medieval wonder(s) that suggests something of Rudolf’s compositional sensibility. His music is not about juxtaposition – for example, seriousness versus triviality. Trying again to express something about working on the edge, Rudolf says: “the root of it is that basically you take the opposites and drive them from, on both sides, to the edge. And there, at the edge, you know, you get that divny, that ‘wonderful’ meaning of the thing that really starts working in a full truth, and it sort of shows itself for what it really is, instead of just being half-covered….”[19] On the edge, the opposition of opposites disappears—they are driven from both sides, not just together, but to the edge. There is no dialectic at work—thesis and antithesis being reconciled in a transcendental synthesis, as the Surrealists sought after (they desired a synthesis of conscious reality and unconscious reality in a super-, that is, sur-reality). Komorous isn’t looking for a new, overarching reality. He’s trying to “push sensation beyond transcendence where it becomes a matter of belief not in another world, but in ‘other possibilities’ in this one.” He finds these possibilities on an edge of our world which, like the margin of the medieval wonderful, stymies formalising representations, definitive analyses, or narrative delineations – rational or poetic, material or spiritual. Again, he’s looking for radical particularity where a thing “shows itself for what it really is” and slips away from being judged for what it means.

Rudolf Komorous’ music has evolved through a number of phases and many different stylistic strategies have been deployed throughout this history: true minimalism (spare sounds utterly exposed); poised, elegant textures worthy of Haydn or Schubert yet insidiously skewed; evocative melodies, redolent with Czechness, which inscrutably dissolve into prosaic, generic ascending scale passages then suddenly evaporate; deliriously dreamlike waltzes and boogie-woogies; nightingale birdcalls and grinding ratchets effortlessly intermingling with virtuoso lyricism or lush hanging harmonies rolled on a vibrato drenched electric piano. This list never needs to end, for Komorous’ music is a gloriously bottomless pit of details. Like Gervase’s list of wonders, these details embrace evenly the grand and the demure (and everything in between and scattered all around). Moreover, this list is not simply applicable to charting Komorous’ historical development. Any of these attributes can be observed uncontentiously co-existing within a given work taken from any stage of his career. Komorous’ compositions are radically local. Each piece defines its own distinct parameters. There is no single strategy that can be generalised for the way he brings elements together. Yet, as with medieval catalogues of wonders, Komorous’ body of work displays a psychedelic coherence of character engendered by the wonder each piece elicits. Profoundly different textures and gestures can be starkly abutted without ever authoring a sense of dramatically pregnant contrasts. In this context, the experimental listener can engage with loud and soft, stasis and movement, major and minor not as opposites, but for their specific properties; and within wonderful relationships that retain their wonder even after the expectations they defy have ceased to bother entering a listening.

In his essay, “Choice and Chance in Cage’s Recent Music”, William Brooks considers John Cage’s music-making systems. He refutes the view of Cage doctrinairely adhering to pure chance and the systematic removal of any subjective intention in the creation of a piece:

“By a kind of self referential logic, procedures designed to accept changing procedures must themselves be subject to change; and by the same logic, if that which is accepted includes intention, it must be possible for these changes to be intentional. If taste is admissible, it must be admissible at all levels; yet, paradoxically, procedures which strictly exclude taste must also be admissible. In effect, the compositional universe must be open to all compositional techniques, from the most arbitrary to the most artful. . . .” [20]

Brooks points to the extreme openness of Cage’s later work where his soundworld could include protracted austerity (some of the number pieces) or unrelenting gestural specificity (Ryoanji) along with extreme diatonic melodicism (Cheap Imitation) or vernacular harmony (Some of ‘The Harmony of Maine’). And he observes:

“The world of music, with all its conventions, is returned to itself, together with all that was gathered on the way; only the values formerly attached to that world have been removed.”[21]

This openness to all that culture and history has to offer is at least as profoundly present in Komorous’ music, as is the stymieing of values (both Cage’s and Komorous’ “aesthetic takes the form not of a judgement, but rather of an experimentation and creation that defies judgement”).[22] However, Rudolf approaches this openness, this edge, from a very different direction (one could think of it as the opposite direction of Cage). Rudolf is a master composer in every academic and scholarly sense of the term. I don’t feel like I have to prove this, but, for example, he voice-leads harmony and moves through consonance and dissonance with a consummate (if abstruse) virtuosity that has me reaching out to everything I know about harmonic rhythm as counterpoint. However, he is still able to present the most basic harmonies in such a way that I feel that I have never heard them before (and I mean first inversion major triads). His textures are truly textures (not just a collection of frequency, amplitude, timbre, and rhythm). It is striking, for example, that the usually easily graspable difference between harmony and orchestration is often utterly confounded in his work.

Komorous sets up his experiments for listeners in the context of the conventions of standard repertoire—including what is for me its most defining convention: the tracing of narrative structures onto musical movement. Rudolf doesn’t eschew musical narrative codes nor does he subversively fracture them. Rather, he thoroughly transmutates them (and the implication of alchemy is apt here). His music doesn’t narrate divny musical stories. Rather, it embodies divny narrative structures. What is most striking about these structures is that there’s nothing like a story to even intuit and there’s no aura of a storyteller trying to assert significance (Rudolf’s music leaves his motivations profoundly unknowable). All of Rudolf’s compositions are “full of memories” (and having “certain definite memories that occur in an indefinite time” is one of his most pervasive divny narrative structures). However, I never sense that I am hearing Rudolf’s memories but rather, my own—a kind of perpetual aural déjà vu that continues to feel like déjà vu even if I really have already heard the piece.

I remember being at a rehearsal of the Toronto-based new music ensemble Arraymusic, for Rudolf’s composition Dame’s Rocket (The Rainbow of Forgetting 2). After about eight and a half minutes of very divny music a waltz occurred. It was a very mysterious waltz that began with the piano alone. The pianist played it in such a way as to represent its mystery – a kind of nocturne-like quasi-rubato with a pensive, elegant phrasing that introduced the peculiarities of the melody. Rudolf thanked her for the fineness of her playing but stated that what he was after was a waltz, a real waltz – a danceable, cooking-right-out-of-the-gate, body-spinning (which includes head-spinning), everyday-ecstatic, wonderful waltz. We were already on that edge—another real thing could happen and we could dance to it. The waltz was/is mysterious; it wasn’t/isn’t a representation of mystery and it didn’t have to be represented as such. Rudolf Komorous’ music is not about wonder, it allows wonder.

This translation has a fittingly curious history: it resulted from an erroneous translation of a German programme note made for a concert in Victoria involving Rudolf’s music. The German note used a coined noun, Wunderlichen, built on the adjective wunderlich, which, like divny, is also commonly translated as “strange/ fantastical/ queer” (never “wonderful,” which corresponds with wunderbar or wundervoll). But I think this mis-translation was a happy accident. The English “strange” does not project all the resonances inherent in Wunder and div (like Wunder, a div is a “marvel/ miracle/wonder.”)

Rudolf Komorous in conversation with John Abram, Victoria, B.C., 1 February 2001. Recording from the private collection of John Abram.

This brings to mind Komorous’ programme note for his piece Gloomy Grace, premiered at the 1968 Donaueschingen Festival: “Gloomy Grace is a composition full of memories. There are certain definite memories that occur in an indefinite time. They combine and separate again. It is approximately as if you were to wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning with a razor at your throat. Perhaps such a situation seen in the movies would seem amusing to you. But don’t forget: it happens to us all once.”

Smidra was certainly influenced by surrealism. In the 1930s, Prague was considered second only to Paris as the centre for surrealist activity (and these activities continue, continuing to invoke the title of surrealism, something that would be an historical anachronism in France today). Rudolf once called Prague the most surreal of cities. André Breton, lecturing to more than 700 people at the Mánes Gallery in Prague in 1935, stated: “Prague with its legendary charms is, in fact, one of those cities that electively pin down poetic thought, which is always more or less adrift in space. . . . when viewed from a distance, with her towers that bristle like no others, it seems to me to be the magic capital of old Europe. . . . By the very fact that [Prague] carefully incubates all the delights of the past for the imagination, it seems to me that it would be less difficult for me to make myself understood in this corner of the world than any other.” André Breton, “The Surrealist Situation of the Object,” Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 255. For more on Czech surrealism see: Karel Teige: l’enfant terrible of the Czech avant-garde, ed. Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Svácha. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999).

William Brooks, “Choice and Chance in Cage’s Recent Music” in A John Cage Reader, edited by Jonathan Brent and Peter Gena (New York: Peters, 1982), 95.

Brooks, 95.

John Cage met Rudolf in Prague in the 1960s and became a lifelong admirer of his music (I had the pleasure of chatting with Cage about Rudolf’s music in 1984). Shortly after Rudolf immigrated to North America, Cage was instrumental in getting him a job at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota where Rudolf lectured 1970-71, prior to taking the job in Victoria the next year.

In part to celebrate Rudolf Komorous’ 85th birthday, I will be performing a new 157-minute version of Anatomy of Melancholy. Komorous compiled his Anatomy of Melancholy in 1974. It is made up of over 5 hours of musical segments—acoustic and electronic—of various lengths (some as short as 20 seconds) originally collected on 4 track, half track, and quarter track reel-to-reel tapes (in the 1990s the entire catalogue was digitized by another former Komorous student, John Abram). These recordings were made between the late 1950s, when Komorous was a central figure among avant-garde artists working in his home-city of Prague, and 1974, three years after he joined the faculty of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Anatomy of Melancholy is performed as a multi-speaker sound installation in which the musical segments are variously collaged and montaged according to a strict plan devised by the tape/disc/soundfile jockey. The listener is encouraged to move through and around the installation, free to enter or leave the performance as she or he wishes.

The piece takes it name from Robert Burton’s massive book of the same name, first published in 1621 and then added to throughout the rest of Burton’s life. One reviewer describes it as “not just Burton’s thoughts on the subject of melancholy, but the thoughts of everyone who had ever thought about it, or about other things, whether that be goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, drink, kissing, jealousy, or scholarship.” Burton called it “a rhapsody of rags gathered from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out.” Its sensibility serves as an apt conceptual antecedent to Komorous’ remarkable collection and the infinite musical tapestries it can produce.

Rudolf’s Anatomy of Melancholy embraces and radiates the estetiku divnosti, an aesthetic he formulated with other like-minded artists in Prague in the 1950s. Divnosti is derived from the Czech word divny, most commonly translated as “strange,” but which also appears as “weird,” “bizarre” or “peculiar.” A recent Czech recording of Komorous’ early work translates estetiku divnosti as “aesthetics of curious things.” In Canada it came to be translated as “the aesthetic of the wonderful.” The group’s intention was “to drive every situation to its end-point, so that the serious and the trivial cannot be distinguished” as well as “to bring into play paradox and the mystifying, in the joy of experiencing the wonderful.” Rudolf further explained in an interview that, “the group’s main philosophy was that things should somehow be driven on the edge – on that edge when you cannot really recognize what’s serious, what’s not serious; you know, what’s true, what’s not true; what’s sort of from life and what is a sheer imagination. Simply that edge – because we thought that on that edge real things happen.” These quotes are highly loaded. In the next few days I’ll be posting an essay I wrote on Rudolf and his music a while ago that unpacks them somewhat. However, I will say now that the edge that Rudolf refers to above is the edge where my listening happens. It’s the edge I’m referring to in the title of this blog, an edge that engenders speculations rather than conclusions.

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This is the blog of Arraymusic's Artistic Director Martin Arnold. While the content found here will focus on the activities of Arraymusic it will also embrace other ideas involved with and spilling out from experimental music.
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